Microsoft named a Leader in 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Access Management for the 6th year

We are honored to announce that Microsoft has been named a Leader in the 2022 Gartner® Magic QuadrantTM for Access Management for Microsoft Azure Active Directory Azure AD, part of Microsoft Entra. We thank our customers who guide our strategy and product innovation, engage with us deeply in...

The many lives of BlackCat ransomware

The BlackCat ransomware, also known as ALPHV, is a prevalent threat and a prime example of the growing ransomware-as-a-service RaaS gig economy. It’s noteworthy due to its unconventional programming language Rust, multiple target devices and possible entry points, and affiliation with prolific...

5 ways to connect with Microsoft Security at Identiverse 2022

Identiverse is where the industry gathers to discuss all things identity. The 2022 conference will take place June 21 to 24 in Denver, Colorado, and I’m absolutely thrilled that Microsoft will be there. At Identiverse, we’ll share how we help customers secure access in a hybrid, multicloud, and...

Easy authentication and authorization in Azure Active Directory with No-Code Datawiza

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association guest blog series. Learn more about MISA. The acceleration of cloud journeys fueled by the pandemic and ever-increasing concerns about data security and information privacy have made access management one of the hottest topi...

Simplifying the complex: Introducing Privacy Management for Microsoft 365

The data privacy regulation landscape is more complex than ever. With new laws emerging in countries like China and India, shifts in Europe and the United Kingdom, and currently 26 different laws across the United States, staying ahead of regulations can feel impossible. But this work is...

Secure unmanaged devices with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint now

As we have entered into new hybrid work environments, businesses need to think about how they will proactively protect their organizations from the influx of new or “bring your own” BYO connected devices. This new normal has exposed the most challenging cybersecurity landscape we’ve ever...

Protecting multi-cloud environments with Azure Security Center

We’ve heard from many of you that multi-cloud adoption is becoming a standard operating model for your organization and that it’s challenging to have the right security controls and posture across your environment. Historically, security teams have not had effective tools to secure multi-cloud...

New cloud-native breadth threat protection capabilities in Azure Defender

As the world adapts to working remotely, the threat landscape is constantly evolving, and security teams struggle to protect workloads with multiple solutions that are often not well integrated nor comprehensive enough. This results in serious threats avoiding detection, as well as security teams...

Microsoft delivers unified SIEM and XDR to modernize security operations

The threat landscape continues to increase in both complexity and the level of sophistication of the attacks we observe. Attackers target the most vulnerable resources in an organization and then traverse laterally to target high-value assets. No longer can you expect to stay safe by protecting...

Microsoft announces new Project OneFuzz framework, an open source developer tool to find and fix bugs at scale

Microsoft is dedicated to working with the community and our customers to continuously improve and tune our platform and products to help defend against the dynamic and sophisticated threat landscape. Earlier this year, we announced that we would replace the existing software testing experience...

3 ways Microsoft 365 can help you reduce helpdesk costs

With more people than ever working remotely, organizations must maximize employee productivity while protecting an ever-growing digital footprint. Many have stitched together specialized security solutions from different vendors to improve their cybersecurity posture, but this approach is expensi...

How to detect and mitigate phishing risks with Microsoft and Terranova Security

Detect, assess, and remediate phishing risks across your organization A successful phishing attack requires just one person to take the bait. That’s why so many organizations fall victim to these cyber threats. To reduce this human risk, you need a combination of smart technology and people-centr...

Gartner announces the 2020 Magic Quadrant for Unified Endpoint Management

I’m excited to announce that, last week, Gartner listed Microsoft as a Leader in its 2020 Magic Quadrant for Unified Endpoint Management. You can read the entire report here, and you can see a snapshot of the Magic Quadrant below. You will note that we improved on both the “Ability to Execute” an...

Prevent and detect more identity-based attacks with Azure Active Directory

Security incidents often start with just one compromised account. Once an attacker gets their foot in the door, they can escalate privileges or gather intelligence that helps them reach their goals. This is why we say that identity is the new security perimeter. To reduce the risk of a data breac...

Lessons learned from the Microsoft SOC—Part 3d: Zen and the art of threat hunting

Threat hunting is a powerful way for the SOC to reduce organizational risk, but it’s commonly portrayed and seen as a complex and mysterious art form for deep experts only, which can be counterproductive. In this and the next blog we will shed light on this important function and recommend simple...

Exploiting a crisis: How cybercriminals behaved during the outbreak

In the past several months, seemingly conflicting data has been published about cybercriminals taking advantage of the COVID-19 outbreak to attack consumers and enterprises alike. Big numbers can show shifts in attacker behavior and grab headlines. Cybercriminals did indeed adapt their tactics to...

Microsoft shares new threat intelligence, security guidance during global crisis

Ready or not, much of the world was thrust into working from home, which means more people and devices are now accessing sensitive corporate data across home networks. Defenders are working round the clock to secure endpoints and ensure the fidelity of not only those endpoints, but also identitie...

Attack inception: Compromised supply chain within a supply chain poses new risks

A new software supply chain attack unearthed by Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection Windows Defender ATP emerged as an unusual multi-tier case. Unknown attackers compromised the shared infrastructure in place between the vendor of a PDF editor application and one of its software vendor...

Microsoft Intelligent Security Association expands with new members and products

Last April, we introduced theMicrosoft Intelligent Security Associationa group of 19 security technology providers who have integrated their solutions with a select set of Microsoft products to provide customers better protection, detection, and response. Today, we are pleased to announce five ne...

The need and opportunity for adaptive prevention in the cloud

This post is authored by Michael Bargury, Data Scientist, C+E Security. The need The cloud introduces new security challenges, which differ from classic ones by diversity and scale. Once a Virtual Machine VM is up and running with an open internet port, it is almost instantaneously subject to...

Securing AI agents: When AI tools move from reading to acting

In this article 1. From reading to acting 2. Attack pattern: MCP tool poisoning in a finance workflow 3. Mitigation and protection guidance 4. References 5. Learn more As enterprise deployments mature, some enterprise AI agents are shifting from reading content to taking action. In this post,...

CNAPP evolution: How Microsoft aligns with leading cloud risk management platforms

Cloud security is shifting from visibility to context-aware risk reduction, helping security teams understand which exposures matter most, prioritize what can be exploited, and reduce risk across the application lifecycle. As organizations continue to expand across multicloud environments,...

Updating the taxonomy of failure modes in agentic AI systems: What a year of red teaming taught us

In this article 1. Why the Taxonomy Needed Updating 2. Seven new failure modes 3. Operational findings: What red teaming showed 4. New mitigations 5. What to do this quarter When the Microsoft AI Red Team published the Taxonomy of Failure Modes in Agentic AI Systems in April 2025, the goal was a...

Threat actor abuse of AI accelerates from tool to cyberattack surface

For the last year, one word has represented the conversation living at the intersection of AI and cybersecurity: speed. Speed matters, but it’s not the most important shift we are observing across the threat landscape today. Now, threat actors from nation states to cybercrime groups are embedding...

Malicious AI Assistant Extensions Harvest LLM Chat Histories

Microsoft Defender has been investigating reports of malicious Chromium‑based browser extensions that impersonate legitimate AI assistant tools to harvest LLM chat histories and browsing data. Reporting indicates these extensions have reached approximately 900,000 installs. Microsoft Defender...

Infostealers without borders: macOS, Python stealers, and platform abuse

Infostealer threats are rapidly expanding beyond traditional Windows-focused campaigns, increasingly targeting macOS environments, leveraging cross-platform languages such as Python, and abusing trusted platforms and utilities to silently deliver credential-stealing malware at scale. Since late...

Unveiling RIFT: Enhancing Rust malware analysis through pattern matching

Today, Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center is excited to announce the release of RIFT , a tool designed to assist malware analysts automate the identification of attacker-written code within Rust binaries. Known for its efficiency, type safety, and robust memory safety, Rust has increasingly...

New Microsoft Security innovations expand multicloud visibility and enhance multiplatform protection

With more than 90 percent of organizations adopting a multicloud strategy1 and cloud-based cyberattacks growing 48 percent year over year,2 securing multicloud and hybrid environments is more important than ever. To successfully protect multicloud infrastructure—where customers are utilizing two ...

KillNet and affiliate hacktivist groups targeting healthcare with DDoS attacks

In the last year, geopolitical tension has led to an uptick of reported cybercrime events fueled by hacktivist groups. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA published an advisory to warn organizations about these attacks and teamed with the FBI on a distributed...

New Windows 11 security features are designed for hybrid work

Attackers are constantly evolving, becoming increasingly sophisticated and destructive—the median time for an attacker to access your private data if you fall victim to a phishing email is 1 hour, 12 minutes.1 Microsoft tracks more than 35 ransomware families and more than 250 unique nation-state...

Stop Ransomware with Microsoft Security digital event presents threat intelligence in action

One of the biggest challenges in security today is visibility. And by visibility, I don’t just mean keeping an eye on ever-evolving cyberthreats, but also seeing your own security environment clearly—especially where you’re vulnerable. For defenders who are working hard to manage threats across...

Cyber Signals: Defend against the new ransomware landscape

Today, Microsoft is excited to publish our second edition of Cyber Signals, spotlighting security trends and insights gathered from Microsoft’s 43 trillion security signals and 8,500 security experts. In this edition, we pull back the curtain on the evolving cybercrime economy and the rise of...

Hardware-based threat defense against increasingly complex cryptojackers

Even with the dip in the value of cryptocurrencies in the past few months, cryptojackers – trojanized coin miners that attackers distribute to use compromised devices’ computing power for their objectives – continue to be widespread. In the past several months, Microsoft Defender Antivirus detect...

‘Ice phishing’ on the blockchain

The technologies that connect us are continually advancing, and while this brings tremendous new capabilities to users, it also opens new attack surfaces for adversaries and abusers. Social engineering represents a class of threats that has extended to virtually every technology that enables huma...

MVP Health Care secures member portal access with Microsoft Azure Active Directory B2C

Hello! I’m Sue Bohn, Microsoft Vice President of Program Management for Identity and Network Access. In today’s Voice of the Customer blog post, Chief Technology Officer and Chief Information Security Officer David Swits of MVP Health Care shares how Microsoft Azure Active Directory B2C helped th...

NOBELIUM targeting delegated administrative privileges to facilitate broader attacks

The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center MSTIC has detected nation-state activity associated with the threat actor tracked as NOBELIUM, attempting to gain access to downstream customers of multiple cloud service providers CSP, managed service providers MSP, and other IT services organizations...

archTIS and Microsoft: Zero Trust information security for Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams has seen a surge in growth during the pandemic with over 115 million daily active users and growing.1 With it, customer imperative for enabling safe and trustworthy online collaboration has also increased significantly. The speed and simplicity of Teams business users creating new...

It’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month and there is still a lot to do

October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month NCSAM. And there is still a lot to do! For the last 17 years, the National Cybersecurity Awareness Month NCSAM campaign, driven by the Department of Homeland Security, has raised awareness about the importance of cyber security across the Nation...

CISO Stressbusters: Post #4: 4 tips for running a highly effective security operation

Rebecca Wynn, Global CISO & Chief Privacy Officer CISO of 247.ai , shares her advice for relieving stress in today’s CISO Stressbuster post. In many organizations, CISO is held accountable for security breaches, yet they don’t have control over all the decisions and systems that impact cyber risk...

Best security, compliance, and privacy practices for the rapid deployment of publicly facing Microsoft Power Apps intake forms

With the dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic, state and federal agencies around the globe were looking at ways to modernize data intake for social services recipients. The government of a country of about 40 million citizens reached out to Microsoft and asked us to assist in this endeavor. Going...

Norsk Hydro responds to ransomware attack with transparency

Last March, aluminum supplier Norsk Hydro was attacked by LockerGoga, a form of ransomware. The attack began with an infected email and locked the files on thousands of servers and PCs. All 35,000 Norsk Hydro employees across 40 countries were affected. In the throes of this crisis, executives ma...

A worthy upgrade: Next-gen security on Windows 10 proves resilient against ransomware outbreaks in 2017

Adopting reliable attack methods and techniques borrowed from more evolved threat types, ransomware attained new levels of reach and damage in 2017. The following trends characterize the ransomware narrative in the past year: Three global outbreaks showed the force of ransomware in making...

ACR Stealer: Two observed intrusion chains amid increased threat activity

In this article 1. Campaign 1: WebDAV-based ClickFix with Python loaders and blockchain C2 2. Campaign 2: MSHTA-initiated PowerShell chain with steganographic payload delivery 3. Mitigation and protection guidance 4. References 5. Learn more From late April 2026 to mid-June 2026, Microsoft Defend...

One intrusion, two cyberattackers: Uncovering parallel threat activity

What began as a routine ransomware investigation quickly revealed something far more complex. In this ninth cyberattack series report, DART details how a single intrusion uncovered parallel activity from two unrelated threat actors operating simultaneously—blending tactics, obscuring signals, and...

Beyond the benchmark: Advancing security at AI speed

In this article 1. From the lab into the pipeline 2. This month’s set of discoveries 3. Beyond the headline: What the engineering work taught us 4. Where we go next 5. Defense at AI speed 6. Learn more Every vulnerability has two clocks running. One belongs to the defender racing to find it; the...

Accelerating detection engineering using AI-assisted synthetic attack logs generation

In this article 1. Core Idea: From TTPs to Logs 2. Approaches for Synthetic Attack Log Generation 3. Evaluation Datasets 4. References 5. Learn more Logs and telemetry are the foundation of modern cybersecurity. They enable threat detection, incident response, forensic investigation, and complian...

The agentic SOC—Rethinking SecOps for the next decade

Every major shift in cyberattacker behavior over the past decade has followed a meaningful shift in how defenders operate. When security operation centers SOCs deployed endpoint detection and response EDR—and later extended detection and response XDR—security teams raised the bar, pushing...

Intent redirection vulnerability in third-party SDK exposed millions of Android wallets to potential risk

In this article 1. Technical details 2. Disclosure timeline 3. Mitigation and protection guidance 4. References 5. Learn more During routine security research, we identified a severe intent redirection vulnerability in a widely used third-party Android SDK called EngageSDK. This flaw allows apps ...

AI as tradecraft: How threat actors operationalize AI

In this article 1. AI as an enabler for cyberattacks 2. Post-compromise misuse of AI 3. Emerging trends 4. Mitigation guidance for AI-enabled threats 5. Microsoft Defender detections Threat actors are operationalizing AI along the cyberattack lifecycle to accelerate tradecraft, abusing both...

Meet the Deputy CISOs who help shape Microsoft’s approach to cybersecurity: Part 2

Microsoft launched its Cybersecurity Governance Council in 2024, and with it, named a group of deputy chief information security officers that ensure comprehensive oversight of the company’s cybersecurity risk, defense, and compliance. These leaders work in tandem with product and engineering...